Out of Office Quotes

“We hear communities endlessly debating whether this is good or bad for their community, and the hard truth is that when you’re one of these towns, you don’t get to make that decision,” Rumore told us. “This change will happen whether they like it or not, so instead the conversation needs to be ‘How do you protect the things you hold dear?’ ”

A big hurdle, Rumore admits, is that many of these desirable rural western communities are politically polarized: liberal enclaves in a sea of deep conservatism. The ideological split can make something as seemingly straightforward as a community meeting incredibly fraught.

But residents of smaller gateway communities tend to share a love of place—its natural beauty, or its seclusion, or its history. When you frame discussions around what’s worth preserving, it can bring people together, even if they disagree on the way to actually go about protecting the places and spaces they love.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“People who’ve adopted an individualist attitude aren’t necessarily sociopaths or assholes: they’ll still donate to a GoFundMe to help a local kid with cancer, or even stop to help someone on the side of the road if they look “safe.” They chip into the gift fund for a co-worker’s fiftieth birthday, tithe to their church, and fundraise for their children’s school. They do want to help others, but they want it to be on their own terms and arbitrate who’s worthy of receiving it. They are often obsessed with the idea of “fairness”: that one can benefit from something only insomuch as they’ve contributed to it themselves.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“This was, and remains, the dystopian reality underlying the redesign and automation of the office. Its mandate is never “You figured out how to do your tasks more efficiently, so you get to spend less time working.” It is always “You figured out how to do your tasks more efficiently, so you must now do more tasks, for the same pay.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“Organizations of every size and shape are always trying to figure out the most desirable, most effective perks their budgets allow, when the easiest one is right there in front of them. They can give their employees the immeasurable gift of a schedule and flexibility that will permit them a world away from work and lift the psychological burden of that second family from their shoulders.

A healthy work culture creates the circumstances for all employees to do their very best work. But a sustainable, resilient one understands and eagerly invites them to have lives outside it.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“Getting rid of the monoculture isn’t just about hiring or promoting people. It’s about figuring out how to organizationally shift the locus of power and control away from those who’ve had it, without question, for so long. This is, in a sense, a radical change when it comes to power dynamics inside companies, and the process will likely create some sort of tension. But it’s wrong to think of these changes one-dimensionally—as a power grab, or an overthrow of an old regime. That kind of thinking is zero-sum, destined to fail, and not how inclusion actually works.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“When you conceptualize diversity as something you add onto an existing monoculture, chances are high those employees will always feel as if they were somehow on the outside of it. And when you treat DEI as a module to complete, you can blind yourself to the way your company fails to integrate its ethos into basic, day-to-day operations.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“We can understand that if companies actually want to cultivate that ever-alluring “good” company culture, they have to rethink not just the amenities and office space they’re providing their employees but the entire style of work, the whole ethos of optimization and presentism. Doing so will demand authentically embracing flexibility, as we discussed in the last chapter. But it will also mean reconsidering core values beyond “growth” and “scale,” and understanding that you cannot compel or surveil your way to sustained, quality productivity. Productivity is the by-product of a workforce that has had its essential needs met.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“As office work began to expand over the course of the twentieth century, workers were sold on promises of comfort and satisfaction. Instead of toiling on a factory room floor, welding the same joint over and over again, you could sit in an office, filing the same report over and over again.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“In America, particularly in non-unionized workplaces, this sort of chronic understaffing acquires a logic all its own. If you can stand to lose employee weight, you should; if you don’t, you’re leaving profits on the table. Appropriately staffing isn’t a way to create a better work environment; it’s “bloat.” Workplaces attempt to counter the negative effects of understaffing with professional development, bonuses, perks, snacks, therapy dogs, subsidized gym memberships, swag, happy hours, access to meditation apps; the list is truly endless. One HR person told us that she was always amazed that employees complained about stress and overwork but then never took advantage of the perks. It makes sense, though. They don’t have the time. What would really make their lives better isn’t a meditation app, but adding a few more employees without also adding the expectation of more work.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“Boundaries can, theoretically, work, but only for a privileged subset of your organization. They’re simply not a sustainable option for the vast majority of workers, especially those who aren’t in senior positions, who are women, who are people of color, or who are disabled. For those groups, attempting to maintain them can lead to an office reputation as difficult, aloof, unresponsive, or the dreaded “such a millennial” or “not a team player.” It might mean getting passed over for promotions or, eventually, getting fired. You can’t 4-Hour Workweek your way out of this problem. You need something structural.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“Life at a flexible company might be unstable, with ever-shifting demands, goals, and expectations for future pay and benefits. But successful workers were the ones who could roll with it: make themselves flexible and remain mostly upbeat. The impetus wasn’t on the company to provide stability but on the workers to amend their attitudes toward the absence of it.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“Efficiency and long hours might seem at cross-purposes, but they’re the twin pillars of the ideal flexible worker: obsessed with productivity, but instead of trading that productivity for less work, they work all the time.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“We don't work from home because work is what matters most. We work from home to free ourselves to focus on what actually does.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“If we shift our focus from relentless productivity, we may collectively rethink our societal metrics for success. A society obsessed with shareholder value, GDP, and corporate wealth creation will value and reward those who drive those metrics upward: bankers, venture capitalists, day traders. A society obsessed with quality of life, care, and societal health values and rewards a very different set of people. Before and during the pandemic, our most “essential” workers struggled to receive equitable pay and adequate protections, precisely because their work wasn’t valued. But what if it was? And what if one of the key steps to getting there was for nonessential workers (like us!) to change the way we see ourselves?”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“One of the refrains of the current moment is “I don’t know how to make you care about other people.” And one of the most straightforward solutions could be giving people the time and mental freedom to actually care about things that aren’t themselves and their immediate families.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“It’s no surprise that people who thrive in the office are almost always the same people who have accumulated or were raised with a lot of identity-related privilege outside it.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“These organizations will not reexamine their offices or their management practices. They won’t interrogate who benefits from existing structures, because they’re pleased with who benefits from existing structures. They will view hybrid work as an annoyance to be tolerated or an incentive to be lorded over workers to keep them productive. And to ensure that their newly liberated employees are on their best behavior, they will take the easiest, laziest way out.”
― Charlie Warzel, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“A flare sent into the air to show you’re working incites others to send up their flares, too.”
― Charlie Warzel, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“Productivity culture is rooted in the ‘performance’ of work: making a to-do list and crossing items off it, achieving in-box zero, writing and sending memos, or holding meetings, or completing tasks that transmute the intangible products of knowledge work into something tangible.”
― Charlie Warzel, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“For managers, whose jobs often have less visible outputs, this may feel especially hard, but it is crucially important. Think about how you spend your time each day. Are you calling meetings because you relish those moments where everyone’s in the same space, or does each meeting have a specific goal? Are your meetings serving each employee, or are they simply the easiest way for you to download information? If the answer is that it primarily serves you, then chances are you are creating more work with tertiary, administrative tasks that you’re passing along to others. It’s not your fault. It’s part of a classic trap where performative work begets more performative work.”
― Charlie Warzel, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“In both situations, few companies find reason to recalibrate. If the work is getting done with fewer people, why change what isn’t broken? The problem, of course, is that the worker is breaking. It might take several years for that breakage to have measurable ramifications, but it will. The recent shift to remote work has offered a unique opportunity to discern just how much work you’re doing. Not “official” work done in the office versus furtive work done at home, but total work.”
― Charlie Warzel, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“Work expands to fill the time available to it, and digital technologies gradually and efficiently carved more and more time out of our nonwork lives.”
― Charlie Warzel, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home